Our mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. We do this through research, policy outreach, and training.

Publication

A series of interactive classroom discussions about gender equality over two and a half years increased students’ support for gender equality and led students to enact more gender-equitable behavior in the state of Haryana, India.

Policy Insight

Offering savings products to smallholder farmers did not transform agricultural investment or output in six studies in sub-Saharan Africa. In a few cases, savings products sometimes benefited farmers by providing a form of risk protection and by helping them smooth consumption over time.

Blog

Around the world, vast amounts of data are now being digitally collected or stored, which creates tremendous opportunities to transform lives through better social policies. Using these data sets in creative and innovative ways to evaluate programs and therefore improve outcomes is a vital step toward making significant progress in the fight against poverty worldwide.

Publication

In Uganda, an incentivized community health promoter program increased health care access, knowledge, and health-promoting behaviors among households, leading to a 27 percent reduction in child mortality.

971 ongoing and completed randomized evaluations in 83 countries

RT @JPAL_Africa: Are you a creative strategist with a strong quantitative background and passion for rigorous evaluation? Do you hav… ...

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often struggle to find foreign markets to export their goods. As such, in recent decades, governments, nonprofits, and donors have increasingly invested resources towards market access initiatives to help solve this problem. These initiatives aim to improve livelihoods for SME workers and promote exports by matching firms with foreign buyers.

In 2016, an estimated 560,000 lives were lost due to interpersonal and collective violence; some 100,000 of these were lost in battle. The recent Pathways for Peace report from the UN and the World Bank underscored the need to develop more innovative responses to address the changing nature of violent conflict, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

In this guest post, Darshak Shavani writes about how a commitment to evidence, and a connection by J-PAL North America, led to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Innovation Center launching the first ever randomized evaluation of a major federal health insurance program in the United States.